RoboZoo: Wired’s Menagerie of Robot Animals

Furby, AIBO and Pleo might be fantastic robot pets, but can they carry hundreds of pounds, outrun a human or lead a school of fish? We think not.

Wired scoured the world's laboratories for the coolest and cutest animal robots.

RoboWorm

An elastic, flexible robotic worm on wheels can inch its way through a simple set of obstacles.

Mechanical engineer Jordan Boyle modeled the 3-D-printed serpentine 'bot after Caenorhabditis elegans, one of the most widely used animal models in neuroscience and genetics research.

RoboWorm can adapt to its environment, but it's not "powerful and robust enough to actually throw out there in the real world," Boyle said. It still lacks the mechanical and computational prowess to work in search-and-rescue missions, which Boyle hopes it will someday do. For now, the mechanical crawler can't burrow through rubble nor sense its surroundings -- both necessary capabilities for a rescue bot.

"It looks like it's detecting its environment and responding to it, but it's actually doing that solely on the basis of proprioception, or one's sense of body posture," Boyle said. That's cool, but not entirely useful for a rescue mission.

Pending funding, Boyle will start working a new prototype that might actually be able to help emergency responders.

Video and image: Jordan Boyle/University of Leeds.

RoboSpider

A white robotic spider could someday help emergency responders assess chemical spills "in environments that are too hazardous for humans," according to a press release from Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft.

The 3-D-printed arachnid will carry a camera and sensors to visualize and measure the severity of chemical hazards. Once the robotic spider has sniffed out the situation, it could send data and images back to its human colleagues. Engineers are still working out how the spider 'bot will accomplish these tasks so it's not quite ready for action, wrote Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft mechanical engineer Andreas Fischer in an e-mail.

The eight-legged robot mimics the way a real spider moves by stepping four legs at a time. Its legs are outfitted with "hydraulically operated bellows drives that serve as joints and keep limbs mobile," reads the press release. Some models are so agile they can even jump, the scientists claim.

RoboSpider is not commercially available, but people can rent one of two prototypes for about $380 per day, said Fischer.

Image: Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft.

RoboJelly

Engineers designed an underwater robot that looks and moves like a moon jellyfish. Unlike previous electrically powered jellyfish robots, this one uses heat energy to move, giving it a longer lifetime.

When hydrogen and oxygen combine with RoboJelly's store of platinum particles, a chemical reaction releases thermal energy. RoboJelly harnesses that heat to contract its artificial muscles and move. The technology is also green, says University of Texas at Dallas mechanical engineer Yonas Tadesse, because the main byproduct is water vapor.

Electrical sources of energy, like batteries, can give out rather quickly, but RoboJelly's power supply is "indefinite, theoretically, because the hydrogen and oxygen can be regenerated from the environment," Tadesse said. Unfortunately, RoboJelly can't go forever: At some point, its artificial muscles will wear out, and it'll stop moving.

If equipped with sensors, these robots could be used to monitor aquatic pollution, said Tadesse.

Video: Heat-powered RoboJelly during a test swim. Yonas Tadesse/University of Texas at Dallas.

RoboGecko

StickyBot, modeled after a gecko, is "a mix of biology, mechanics and motion," claims a YouTube video from its Stanford University designers.

"We wanted to send robots into any environment," said mechanical engineer Salomon Trujillo in the video. StickyBots "work in a vacuum, so we can use them out in space. So we can have robots that can do space exploration or even cling to the side of the space shuttle."

RoboLizard

A male anole lizard establishes his territory by head-bopping and extending his dewlap, a large flap of under-jaw skin. These signals tell others males, "Stay out. This area is mine, and so are all the females in it!" But sometimes that message gets lost, so the males have one more trick: push-ups. They bounce up and down on all fours, making themselves even more conspicuous. Once the male catches another anole's attention, it can stop the push-up regimen and start head-bopping instead.

Evolutionary biologist Terry Ord of Australia's University of New South Wales deciphered this form of lizard language in 2008 with the help of robotic lizards. He used them as "a tool to probe [lizard] communication," said Ord. The robots "allow us to basically talk to the animals."

Using robots, he can adjust the frequency of push-ups, dewlap color, and whether the robotic reptiles extend the dewlap at all. He can then analyze if changing these parameters make communication more or less effective. Using similar robots, Ord is now studying gliding draco lizards from Southeast Asia.

Image and video: Terry Ord.

RoboFish

Simus is a bionic robofish designed by engineers at German research organization Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, who claim the 3.5-inch swimmer is the world's smallest autonomous robotic fish.

RoboShiner

A robotic version of the golden shiner, a minnow that lives in lakes and marshes in North America, may help researchers study how fish interact, according to a recent study.

In a lab experiment, researchers got real golden shiners to swim behind a robotic leader, much like real fish follow each other in the wild. The researchers don't know why the fishes followed a robot fish, but think they were probably fooled by its lifelike body plan and tail motion.

RoboSunfish

“We still don’t understand the fundamentals of fish swimming,” said roboticist James Tangorra of Drexel University. To figure out how a fish’s sensory system interacts with its muscles, bones and fins, he took to building robots.

Tangorra developed his mechanical sunfish with the help of biologists and neuroscientists. It can sense its own body, just like a real fish, and has pressure sensors that measure water flow and pressure. These mimic the lateral line, a sensory organ that helps fish perceive motion through water.

With robots, hypotheses can be tested in a controlled system, Tangorra said. He hopes the results will help engineers improve the design of autonomous underwater rovers that explore deep waters. “The ocean environment is more foreign to us than outer space,” he said.

Image: James Tangorra / Drexel University.

RoboSquirrel

Squirrel robots help researchers at the University of California, Davis understand how real squirrels interact with their main predators, rattlesnakes.

When a squirrel approaches a rattlesnake, it wags its tail and sends out an infrared signal from its tail. Rattlesnakes can perceive infrared cues using their pit organ, and the message might shift snakes’ behavior. However, squirrels also use scent and visual signals, so understanding the precise role of infrared signals is difficult.

"The squirrels will naturally do their many different signals at the same time. And it's very difficult to say what the effect of just one part is. That's where the robots come in," said UC Davis mechanical engineer Sanjay Joshi, who built RoboSquirrel.

When the researchers tested how infrared tail wagging affected snake behavior with squirrel 'bots, the snakes spent less time looking for food and more time in defensive postures. The researchers claim rattlesnakes very rarely attack wagging squirrels and often miss when they do, suggesting squirrels may use tail-waving to discourage rattlesnakes from lunging at them.

Still, the snakes don't always miss. In a video filmed during recent field studies, the researchers recorded a confrontation between a rattlesnake and RoboSquirrel. It looked like the squirrel bot nearly got its head chomped off. "They actually found venom in the robot. But it didn't do much structural damage," Joshi said. "Luckily it was a robot."

Image and video: University of California, Davis.

RoboDog

Man's best friend has a robotic alter-ego: the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's AlphaDog, also known as Legged Squad Support System, or LS3. The headless pooch is equipped with sensors that let it differentiate between trees, rocks and people.

The semi-autonomous robotic canine, developed by Boston Dynamic, can haul 400 pounds and trot 20 miles without needing a fuel boost. Darpa also wants to give its pet a sense of hearing, "enabling squad members to speak commands to LS3 such as 'stop,' 'sit' or 'come here,'" according to a Darpa press release.

AlphaDog is still a prototype, but Darpa hopes its four-legged 'bot will be able to "carry a considerable load from dismounted squad members, follow them through rugged terrain and interact with them in a natural way, similar to the way a trained animal and its handler interact."

RoboCheetah

In March, Darpa released a video of their robotic cheetah running at a top speed of 18 mph. Though that's faster than most people, it's still a ways off from a real cheetah's top speed of about 70 mph.

Darpa's speedy kitty "increases its stride and running speed by flexing and extending its back on each step, much as an actual cheetah does," claimed a Darpa press release.